Interviews

Sucker Punch's Brian Fleming

You've never heard of Brian Fleming? Neither had I, because Sucker Punch is one quiet little developer. Wait, you've never heard of Sucker Punch? Sucker Punch is the coterie of maniacs behind 2002's outstanding Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus, as well as 1999's more low-key N64 bonanza Rocket: Robot on Wheels. Now it's got Sly 2: Band of Thieves in the works, and that looks set to maintain the company's reputation for quality. In any case, I recently had the chance to talk games with Mr. Fleming, who is a Sucker Punch co-founder and the producer for Sly 2. When offered an Altoid he gladly accepted, so I knew it would be a good interview.

GameSpy: What do you, Brian Fleming, do at Sucker Punch?

Brian Fleming: My job is to sort of see the ocean, not the waves. I need to make sure we're going in a good direction. It's really guys like Nate [Fox] and Dev [Madan] that make the game what it is, and I just try to help make sure we're going in a good direction if I can.

Second, my responsibility is to make sure we have the right team together. So I interview everyone, whether they're coming in for programming, testing, 3D animation, 2D art, I interview everyone and try to make sure we have the right people, run the budget, things like that.

Finally, my job is to keep our relationship with Sony on track. Whether that's product development issues, marketing, PR ... When you're a small independent developer and have a first-party relationship with Sony, it's something you pay attention to. We worry about that.

GameSpy: Are you working exclusively with Sony now?

Brian Fleming: Yep. Very happy to. Thrilled, actually. They do a good job on our stuff, and they let us do what we want to do, which is make video games and not run media days and market the title.

GameSpy: So that's a long-term relationship?

Brian Fleming: I think we hope it is, but we work at the pleasure of Sony, so if we started screwing up they would end that in a heartbeat. We respect them a lot and I think they respect us for what we do, and that's a good relationship.

GameSpy: What did you learn from making Rocket and [the original] Sly Cooper?

Brian Fleming: [laughs] How much time do you have to talk?

I think one of the most humbling things about working at Sucker Punch has been how many lessons we've had to learn. The big-picture lessons are ... I'll give you the business answers. Rocket was about learning the business of making video games, in many ways. This was our first title and we thought it'd be very smart to build a significant portion of a video game and then take that around to publishers because then we somehow imagined we'd be in a very good negotiating position, because we would have a nearly finished game we believed in and they would not be taking very much risk because the game was almost complete and they'd be able to publish it and we'd get a huge royalty.

Well this is wrong in more ways than I would care to enumerate. A, no one has a process for acquiring an 80% complete game. They all have a process for acquiring new pitches and things, but it's really unusual for them to do anything other than a "I want to make a few bucks" strategy. They have no plan for how to make a big title out of a game they pick up late in the development cycle.

Second, it takes an unbelievably long time to get the internal momentum at any publisher required to get the marketing, sales, PR, testing, executive management excited about a title. You can't do it in two months, and you can't do it the month before E3. It takes time. You have to do demo after demo and you have to go to their quarterly meetings and get the European subsidiaries excited. So you walk in six months before you're ready to complete a nearly-done game, you're screwed. So we made both mistakes on Rocket, and it was a big learning experience.

I think we also learned how to make ... It was our first video game, we had a lot to learn about writing an engine, making authoring tools. We're still learning, but we had a lot to learn about how to hire people who are not programmers. Chris [Zimmerman] and I and Brian [Oberg] came from Microsoft and we had a good idea, I think, about how to hire and motivate programmers. But we had an awful lot to learn, and still do, about motivating and working with artists. And so Rocket was a great experience for us to do that. That was a very challenging period for us where we had to learn a lot.